


Wunderkammer

by thehousewedestroyed



Series: The Real Relationship Was The House We Destroyed Along The Way [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Claustrophobia, M/M, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 20:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehousewedestroyed/pseuds/thehousewedestroyed
Summary: The house was already cursed. Not the kind of curse that has a name. The kind that soaks into the walls, stuck between layers of wallpaper.





	Wunderkammer

The house was already cursed. Not the kind of curse that has a name. The kind that soaks into the walls, stuck between layers of wallpaper. There was a strip torn away in Sirius’ childhood bedroom, that he used to pick with his fingernail when he couldn’t sleep. Underneath the fading yellow, a pattern of green. He used to wonder if the house had walls at all, or if it was just layers and layers of paper and paste. Were the rooms bigger once, before each generation added another layer? His aunt, his grandfather, his grandfather’s grandmother—who was also his third cousin—grew up in this room. Was the room green, back then? Was it an inch wider on every side?

The portraits used to gossip. They whispered at night. There are no ghosts in this house, but what is a portrait except a ghost inside the walls?

This house is as flat as a shut book. It was flat before Dumbledore cursed it into a two-dimensional space, squeezing the walls together until it no longer existed. Until the wall of number 10 meets the wall of number 14, so narrow a knife couldn’t fit between the two. A secret place. Just paper.  


And he lives in it.

After twelve years in one room, it should feel like freedom. It should feel like there is space, like there is air. There are people to talk to. There is Remus.

Not right now, though. He scrambles to find a window. To see the sky. Azkaban had windows, at least. Azkaban was not a townhouse.

Is it a full moon? Did everyone forget him? Did Remus forget him?

Only a crescent. He might lose track of where he is, but never _when_.

Better safe than sorry. Curl up on the rug, tail over his nose. Breathe through the fur, instead of the smell of mildew. Ears flicking at the whispers of portraits. No house-elf muttering, at least. Gifted to an aunt who had the good sense to get out of this place.

He spent a year without light. A year in a suitcase, under a desk, under seven locks. No sky: nothing to see except for a sallow, sneering face that tossed him food from time to time. No way to keep track of day and night, let alone the moon. No way to know when Remus or Harry or someone would figure out where he’d gone. A year as a dog, just in case. He kept his promise.

Azkaban was a holiday, really, compared to the rest of it.

He’d had a neighbour, at least. A Death Eater with a Russian accent, who never touched a bite of food in the decade they sat opposite each other. He knew Sirius was a dog: he’d watched him change enough times. Sirius knew he was—something else. Something much older than a Death Eater, or maybe much more literal. The Dementors seemed not to affect him. Something about souls, probably. He chatted with Sirius, while the other prisoners raged and mourned. Maybe the Russian's company kept him sane. Maybe he's not sane.

Sirius saw him again, once. The day Remus and Tonks hauled him out of the trunk, weak and half-blind from a year in the dark. But Hogwarts was still Hogwarts, and he remembered every secret and passage without needing the map. They could hear the battle from up the passage, Sirius with a borrowed wand in hand, wondering if it would be easier to just turn back into a dog and rip out some throats. They collided with a Death Eater. But the man clapped him on the shoulder, called him _my dog friend _in a Russian accent, and bade them all good day.

He never properly explained that to Remus and Tonks. He’s not sure he could.

The Death Eaters had come through a cabinet, the time before. There’s a cabinet in the second-floor study of Grimmauld Place. In each drawer and chamber, something strange. A dragon’s scale. An acorn from a thousand-year-old oak. A tuft of werewolf hair, tied with string. A runestone. A vial of silvery substance that might be a ghost. A collection of strange samples gathered by some unknown ancestor. All labelled meticulously in handwriting he struggled to read, when he was young. A hundred drawers, doors, and panels, all higgledy-piggledy: some locked, the keys long since lost. On the face of each door is a painting. A hundred tiny landscapes. As if each door had two worlds within, the flat one on the surface and the real chamber hidden inside. 

It was easy to believe a person could travel through a cabinet. After all, he lived inside a suitcase. A door is a door is a door.

They said Azkaban had driven him mad. But nobody grew up in Grimmauld Place without a little madness. It was in the blood. In the walls.

He asked Phineas about it once. Phineas could move through a flat plane, from one building to another. He could slip to one side and wander through the castle, as long as he stayed on its walls. Sirius could lift his portrait off the wall and check it was only as thick as canvas, but Phineas lived in it, moved in it, walked into the edges of the frame like it was a door. Like it was a door.

‘You always liked that cabinet,’ Phineas said. It's true: Sirius used to spend hours discovering the trinkets and treasures within it, or other times, just looking at the miniature worlds on its surface. His fingers traced over the keyholes of the locked doors. No keys, but the whole cabinet is a skeleton key: to the places in the paintings.

Harry lived in a cupboard. They don’t talk about it, but sometimes when he’s here, they just sit in the lounge, in the sun.

The year the house was headquarters was the worst. People turned the lights off while he was still in the room. He was part of the furniture, a permanent fixture. He cannot be removed from it. There are versions of his face in the paintings. They look like mirrors. He has Walburga’s eyes and Walburga’s side table. He has the nose of Sirius II—he is not even his own Sirius, there are three—and the bureau of Sirius I in his room. He is a curiosity, to be locked away when he isn’t needed.

He blasts out a wall because he thinks he might finally be going mad. Because he’s started turning sideways to get down the hallway. Because he cannot breathe and he cannot see the sky and he isn’t sure how long he’s been in this house, or how he’d know if he was only made of paint. He knows why Remus used to claw at the walls of the shack. He says so, when he and Remus are in bed together. At some point before Remus leaves. Not just the house, but leaves _Sirius. _But there's not entirely a difference between leaving the house and leaving Sirius, is there?

Still, even after it's over, Remus comes back to the house. Which is enough like coming back to Sirius. He floos into the kitchen with bags of takeaway food, half of which will go bad in the fridge and taste better at full moon.

A fire is a door, sometimes. He considers it.

He finds a ring of little keys under a floorboard, when he and Harry are spending their days vehemently renovating. He rubs his thumb over the intricate metalwork, the complex set of teeth in each one. He knows, from the size and texture and that strange thrill, what it is for.

The smallest door in the cabinet. He takes a moment to look at the scene painted around the keyhole: a castle. He turned a castle into paper, once. He guides the key in, feeling the teeth slide into place. Turns, first one way then the other. The weight of the tumblers giving way. The hinge gives a little creak.

He doesn’t realise right away. It looks empty. Crouches, closer, fingers probing the walls of the chamber. Only a slip of parchment, in that familiar scrawl.

_Boggart._

Sirius laughs. He calls Remus over, tells him he’s found the best one yet.


End file.
